Model of a modern Danish monarchy

ON SATURDAY night, as Danish soldiers enacted a
thousand-year-old Viking ritual of lighting bonfires across the
country to celebrate a new heir to the throne, IT workers Michael
Jensen and Michael Hansen stood in a Copenhagen park and reflected
on why they liked living in a monarchy.

"Our royal family does well, if you look at other royal
families," said Mr Jensen, 36. "Not too many scandals. They
represent Denmark in a good way around the world."

"You can't buy this," said Mr Hansen, pointing at the scene of
soaring flames and a crowd waving Danish flags. "It's a great
tradition but it's also great marketing for the country. I mean,
you're here, aren't you? A lot more people know about Denmark
because of the monarchy."

The last French royals lost their heads, the last Russians were
shot in a cellar. The British Queen carries on with dignity but
much of her family has slipped into the grubby embrace of the
tabloids.

The Danish royals, though, are thriving. Not only is no
guillotine in sight, their support is actually growing  from
about 60 to 80 per cent in opinion polls in the past 20 years.

Their popularity rests on their ability to reflect the mores of
a small but wealthy nation, and on an apparent contradiction: the
enduring importance of national identity in a globalised world.

"They are more or less like any other bourgeois family," said
Copenhagen University historian Sebastian Olden-Jorgensen. "The
brand, so to speak, is of a harmonious, family life very close to
middle-class values. It is something a large section of the
population can identify with."

Like his father before him, the new prince may go to Krebs, an
elite private school in an ivy-covered, red-brick building in
central Copenhagen. But there's a good chance he will go to a state
kindergarten and even, as Frederik did in his final years of
schooling, a state high school. It's all very modern. But until
Frederik and Mary became media celebrities it was the cultivated
Queen Margrethe who almost single-handedly made the monarchy
popular. The 65-year-old queen paints, designs ballet costumes and
has translated books by Simone de Beauvoir into Danish. Far more
private than Frederik and Mary, she occasionally makes public
interventions in national debate.

Mr Olden-Jorgensen said the queen's line came to the throne at
the moment Danes were forced to recognise they would never again be
a great power. It was 1864 and Denmark had suffered a catastrophic
military defeat to Germany.

Christian IX and his charismatic wife Louisa stepped in to play
a vital symbolic role, said Mr Olden-Jorgensen. Whereas the British
royal family remained connected with imperial grandeur, "Danes
thought having a royal family provided evidence they would not
disappear, that they had a place as a small country".

That remains Denmark's identity: a small country that punches
above its weight. Helping to maintain that identity may be the job
of the boy born on Saturday.

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